know who you are by forgiving who you’re not
accept and move on but never give up
treasure your dreams
never be dissatisfied with what you have
heed warnings from those you respect
avoid materialism
get out, clear your heart, let go
know the difference between anger and wild
figure out who you are apart from everyone
contribute to others well-being
– I have flaws and it shows when I’m filled with crappy emotions
Hate this…
Tags: TAKASHI
If you’ve wandered here via Google, know that the code is 7296. Alternatively, you can give this number a call and ask them for a 4 digit code / service centre code: 08442480544
Good luck.
Before I used to think (i.e. unfounded belief) that music plays an important part in my life. Now I definitely know that music is a part hard to take off my life. I don’t know if the correlation can link to any causation or not, but my moodiness has been fluctuating more than usual lately (but mostly in the wrong way, down more than up) – today I figured out that, well, to put it simply: I want to listen to what I want to listen.
Hey, you might think, it’s not that hard isn’t it? We’re living in a world that facilitates that need to the extreme, provided you have a computer and are not computer illiterate – just youtube it, or google it. Too bad it doesn’t work that way… for me at least.
When I play music (out loud), there’s a huge difference in choice depending on the situation, mostly, depending on any person around. For a fact, some music I want to listen to, I will never ever play it when someone’s around, no matter how close the person might be or how far I might be able to ignore the person. Then, there are music which I would play if someone close to me is around. Usually, I have a list of music that actually just serves the purpose of being played out loud when I have people around (but those are not necessarily music that I particularly like).
This coupled with the fact that this hackintosh makes the front headphones jack of my PC useless (so I only have the option of playing music out loud), and the fact that I’ve lost countless of times my precious collection of music, makes it way too hard. Luckily I have my iPhone…
There are times I’ve started a song I really wanted to listen just to have it stopped by someone who doesn’t like it. Well that can’t be helped but I guess it does affect me somehow.
Onto the theme of music, I guess I like electronica, trance, dance, jpop, original soundtracks/instrumental and low/moody music the most. Some of the most-listened tracks in my previous music collection were from I’ve Sound, Kajiura Yuki’s, Yann Tiersen’s, Jay Chou’s, Manu Chao’s, Air’s (the band), and the ever addicting multiple game/anime OSTs. Well, I guess you can find that out from my last.fm page already – although there are some tracks I play that I don’t want to appear on there… so it’s only 70% of it I guess?
Another thing I thought about today is bits from my past. I think it’s because I’ve been playing too much Heroes of Newerth lately (and listening to Basshunter doesn’t help either). I remembered the times my mates and I were playing DoTA every lunchtime now and then back in 12th grade. Wow, I don’t know why they (the French guys) started on playing DoTA even… how did it catch on? I can’t remember clearly. It was very fun though and we used to shout in the whole room. It started mostly with Counterstrike then onto one or two matches of DoTA. Sometimes we would play after school as well.
One thing that is apparent I guess is some people’s characters through the hero they choose. I can clearly see one guy choosing Jeraziah because of his personality…
J’ai pas ecrit un mot en francais depuis trop longtemps… ca manque parfois!
First off let me start with wishing a happy new 2010 year to all of you, from the Blue Feather blog! :)
And now onto the official news… Yes, it’s official. I’ve never wanted a phone this bad before… I want the Nexus One. Reasons? Hm.
I currently own an Apple iPhone 3GS (the 16GiB one), however I used to hate iPhones and anything touchy for a phone. I believed I only need a phone for its phone features, so any phone which has some good features in its OS like the Sony Ericsson ones will do. I don’t need extra buff.
All that changed when I got the iPhone as a gift. I loved it. The apps enhance its use so much more, and battery didn’t seem much like a problem like I’ve thought before. Sure, I can’t use it as long as my previous S500i, but it’s fair enough for daily usage. Also, I love being able to do stuffs like learn Kanjis on-the-go, look at Google Maps and having the compass… I’m a person who easily gets lost.
But something was still amiss with the iPhone. App Store sucked out too much money from me, and I had to jailbreak the phone to really enjoy it. An iPhone not jailbroken would turn me off rather quickly. What’s the use of having an ARM CPU and some cool OS base, and then lock it all up? I need my SSH, my Terminal, my “look-at-the-whole-drive”…
That’s where comes Android, the OS running on Nexus One and plenty other phones. When I heard it got announced as the next big thing from Google, I really liked it. I even argued with my flatmate at that time that Android is going to beat iPhone in the long-run. Sure, one’s a phone and one’s an OS, but I knew Android’s the way forward. The iPhone, I knew, would dominate the market and spawn a zillion of clones afterwards though – it’s simply too good of a design. And the Apple team for UI testing is real good. I kind of harbored a small wish that Google would actually release a phone…
And they did! And look at the price: 550 USD or so. For that price and to get it unlocked, it’s like a dream come true. Also, I believe Ars Technica had a good point when they said what they really announced was the URL, i.e. Google’s Phone Store, selling unlocked phones by default. It’s going to revolutionize the phone market in the US as it stands right now. Google… what can you expect more?
The slender design of the iPhone beats the Google Nexus One by far in my opinion, however I like the geeky feel of the Nexus One. You can already see it flushing out from Android. And with all the specs, I think it’s going to be a good phone in the long run. Will there be a Nexus Two? I hope so! If I can’t get enough money to buy it till they do release “Nexus Two”, then all the better, since I’ll be aiming for that one instead!
Anyway. Go check it out, not that millions other phone geeks have blogged about it enough already these past days…
Here’s a nice comparison chart for the recent “big” players in the Smartphone market: Current Crop of Smartphones.
The Nexus One from Google & HTC
孝
Christmas is coming but I still have no plan… yet. But let’s forget about that special day for now and blog like it’s another usual day.
Two things that have caught my web-development goggles – Feedly, a well-done web-application by DevHD and JSNinja, the book written by John Resig (the guy behind JQuery). If you’ve read this far and haven’t got a clue, you may continue reading at your own peril (of not understand a word from what I’m going to blog!).
I’m using Feedly now actually, and the instant effect is that NewsFire – that cool application to read RSS feeds on Mac OS X, has been dumped right away into my Trash bin. It’s so much easier (and kewler) to read stuffs with Feedly. For starters, you can try it out if you have a Google Account (it uses as backend Google Reader) and if you run Firefox. I’m not sure whether it can run without the Firefox add-on or not, but I really don’t care. My web-developing soul is crying out loud that it’s bad to support just one browser, but hey, this is just what I’m using, so Feedly fits perfectly in.
It’s a bit hard to configure like you want it, but the default probably will be good for almost everyone (well, you might want to turn off stuffs like the Stocks add-on in the sidebar if you’re not into finance!). I’ve got mine to a good-enough configuration (a shame I can’t make my own CSS style, but I’ll probably be too lazy to do it – and the default theme from Feedly is sublime enough). The nice thing? It actually feels like you’re reading a magazine of some sort instead of just a list of feeds. “Human” side to it I guess? For example, I’m a poster @ GameVN (won’t tell you what’s my nickname!), and as every vBulletin does – GameVN has a RSS Feed (they even kindly provide v0.91 or v2). It can be configured into individual subforums (I have mine set as 82, 84 and 371 – go figure what those subboxes are!). If I included that into a RSS Feed reader program, like NewsFire, it would feel very plain – instead, Feedly extracts out the image in the post and puts it in a nicely presented way so that a topic in GameVN, which normally would look so unprofessional (understandably), instantly turned into something similar to an article from Ars Technica. Oh, I also subscribe to that one.
I’m not sure to what extent does the add-on make feedly work, but the visual thing that you’ll notice if you do install it on your Firefox is a green button with Feedly’s icon (fits in nicely with my Naver theme btw!) – it sits just beside your “home” button, that I never use.
Anyway, give it a try if you’re interested!
The second thing is that book. Javascript Ninja, fitting name for someone like myself or anyone who’s been working far long enough with Javascript to understand how its confusing closure system works. Wait, you don’t know what’s a Javascript Ninja? Here, let me show you the secret of our arts…
A Javascript Ninja
I’ve known about it ever since last year actually, working at <censored>. Someone from the team bought the book (it’s not finished yet but by preordering it you have access to chapters in pdf form as soon as it’s out) – and he kindly uploaded it up into our central repository… talk about copyright infringement *cough*! Well, not that I mind. Though at that time I was far less interested in that way of working with Javascript – I was more of an organized soul looking into ways to wrestle with MVC in Javascript. I’ve long abandoned that idea now, especially concentrating on this final year’s project which requires the use of both client-side scripting and server-side development. I’d really like to get that book (buy it), but I guess I’m going to hold back that thought – maybe it’ll fire up again when it’s completed and published.
On another unrelated note, Wordpress announced their upgrade to 2.9 some days ago. If you’re wondering why this blog is still on 2.8.x, well, we’re actually using mu-Wordpress. Enough said.
That’s it for now! Back to coding hell…
Tsumugi from K-ON!
… no unfortunately it doesn’t look as relaxing and fun like Tsumugi in that picture :( …
孝
That’s it! Done with almost everything from semester 1. Final year takes away most of your time and it’s so hard to find some freetime to do things you really want to do. Well, not that hard, I still have my fair share of gaming and manga reading – however it isn’t as much “play” as it was before… Oh, I’m in my 4th year after a placement, which I guess you people in the US would call “senior year” of a Bachelor degree.
Recently OneManga decidedly made a nice move including a RSS Feed into their website of newly “released” translated manga. I used to dislike RSS Feeds – I mean, who would want to run a forever running rss feed reader in their PC eating away RAM? Now it’s different though – I’m on Mac OS X (“Hackintosh” though) and its memory management system is fab – with NewsFire running, it doesn’t even seem that much more load, even though I’m still on a 2 GiB RAM system! (Didn’t think I’d go into installing a x86_64 operating system which is why I chose only 2 GiB RAM… how wrong was that decision now that I’m on Leopard, sigh…) Yeah, and the updating icons on the Dock is also great… I’m addicted to Mac OS X now. All the best that I want in Windows and all the solid backend I wanted in BSD merged together, with a nice GUI: Aqua… what more to ask? It’s the best thing to use for my line of work (I’m a Client-side Developer, i.e. Web Developer).
Another thing to say is that OneManga now implemented an Advanced Search system – I experimented with it and tried to look for manga which bear the tag Historical (but to avoid stuffs like Fushigi Yuugi, of course I had to stop Shoujo from appearing). Then one thing hit me: a lot of historical manga (at least the ones on OneManga) are manhwa or manhua…
After some refining, OM spurted me a reasonable list of 10-15 or so historical seinen/josei manga. I went through most of them, though I’ve actually read most of them already. But flicking through the list, I found something interesting: Shut Hell, also known as Akuryou. A quick résumé of the story’s contextual position goes along the line of: it’s early 13th century and Genghis Khan had united most of the Mongol tribes. He now plans on invading the western Xia (Tây Hạ) country and erasing it from the world map altogether. Our story opens with a young man in contemporary Japan who has vivid dreams of battles from the time, through the eyes of a soldier of western Xia – she’s the main heroine they call “Shut Hell”. Once he meets Suzuki, his conscience is transported into the dreams with the help from an ancient music instrument. We now get to read about how a forgotten son of Genghis Khan and the devil woman Shut Hell traces their journey through Western China to help preserve Xia’s culture and writing.
It has its fair share of lame-ness, however the plot intrigues me as a historical-amateur. Too bad only 17 chapters seem to have been released. Hopefully it’ll grow in time!
Here’s an artwork from Shut Hell (link is to TVTropes) to tease your appetite (if any!)
Shut Hell, author's artwork
I want to blog more about other stuffs and not just manga but it’ll have to wait until I get enough stuffs to put into one blog entry! For now, it’s until next time… Stay tuned!
孝
Hello reader. If you’re a bit confused let me reconfirm that, yes, this blog is written by two authors.
Let me tell you a bit about myself. No actually, let’s not do that – let’s do something awesome, like muse around about anime, manga, technical tidbits and the like. You like that don’t you?
Well I’m not watching any anime in particular right now though (blame the time constraints I have imagined in my head), but I’m following a fair amount of manga. It’s the best thing to do when you have some free time. Recently I got hooked on to Nurarihyon no Mago. It’s a bit cliché, but being an avid fan of everything surreal and fantastic (throw in magic and you’ve got half of my ear, throw in onmyouji, western witchcraft, dragons and nice plotlines and you’ve got my full attention!)… well, I’ve decided to follow it.
The story follows Awesome-kid-who’s-actually-badass-at-night (no, not Spiderman.. *cough*) through his various encounters with monsters from Japanese folklore (called “youkai”). He’s actually a commander of youkai so he’s been living with them since he was born, however Japan (of course everything has to happen in Japan) is much bigger and the title commander of youkai which seemed real high is actually equivalent to a somewhat-petty yakuza section boss. He meets various people and gets entangled into a fight which goes way past his era (to his grandgrandgranddad’s). Hey, isn’t this a typical shounen storyline? Anyway, it’s cool, you should check it out, if not just for the sake of studying youkai (use that for an excuse when reading in class/found reading it by your mom)
Apart from that I tend to dabble into many things technical, such as reverse-engineering, web development (I’m actually running this site alongside my trustworthy serva-.., erm, trustworthy other author), network management… and the list goes on. So you may find I will blog about that on here too.
Oh wait I need a picture to make this entry look cool. So here you go.
Nurarihyon no Mago Art, by kala(saica)
… Until next time!
孝
Tags: Nurarihyon no Mago, TAKASHI
